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US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

energy.gov

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Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#721

Post by gateroid »

over_bridge wrote: post #637

Are there any thoughts on how this will become a power plant yet? It's awesome to see it filled up, reacted and then reset as a proof of concept, but can it ever be a continuous flow through the chamber without losing that ignition temp? Or will it be more like a 4 cylinder engine where each reactor is at a different stage of being filled, heated, reacting and emptying, with the net result being continuous? Edit: Tak…

NIF never was designed to be a power plant or have anything to do with power generation. This is something most commenters don't appear to appreciate. It's an experimental facility that, when distilled to its simplest explanation, lets us study things when you squish them really, really hard. It turns out, fusion is one of the things you can study when you squish stuff really hard - and one of the big challenges was controlling how you do the squishing (which turns out to be pretty difficult).

There are lots of other problems that NIF also studies that boil down to "what does this do when we squish it" that have nothing to do with fusion or energy production. Aside from the weapons program applications, there are experiments that take place there in materials science, understanding extreme environments ("what do these elements we believe sit in the core of Jupiter act like at those pressures?"), etc.

TLDR: Think of NIF as a lab for energetically squishing things. It's not a power plant, it's not a prototype for a power plant, it's not a pre-prototype for a power plant, etc. It's a lab for basic physics research. It's about as close to being a prototype for a power plant as a test tube in a lab full of hydrocarbons is to being a prototype of an internal combustion engine.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#722

Post by tomComb »

oreilles wrote: post #669
opportune wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agree. We should be dumping as much as we can in getting fusion up and running ASAP. It could be a silver bullet to stop climate change alone, and by driving energy costs lower, enable huge innovations in AI/automation and increasing material wealth. $1T to move fusion forward just 5 years from eg 2040 to 2035 could alone have a huge ROI in terms of climate mitigation and decarbonization

Cheaper and cleaner energy has never in the history of enery lead to global reduction of pollution, actually pretty much the opposite. Plus, nuclear power is already virtually free and has been available since the 1970s. If stopping climate change was an energy source problem, it would have already been solved then.

“nuclear power is already virtually free”

What? Cost is THE problem with nuclear energy.

You must have some bizarre way of framing things to make today statement - you should at least tell us what that is since you must know that you are making a controversial claim.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#723

Post by floxy »

pfdietz wrote: post #380
azinman2 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To achieve fusion for power production, you need more output than input. For 60+ years this hasn’t been achieved in a replicated fashion. Now it has, and it’s 50% more power rather than 0.1% more power as was sometimes shown for 2 nanoseconds before. So now we know fusion for power is possible. If it can be scaled successfully (now likely not an if anymore, but a function of time), then we have the ability to have cl…

I'm asking why this somewhat arbitrary line being crossed is something I should care about. It doesn't imply fusion will reach a state of practical application. Why is this more exciting that achieving a ratio of .1, or .5, or 2, or 10? It seems entirely arbirary to me, and smells of an argument that somehow this has made the end goal significantly more attainable.

>It seems entirely arbitrary to me

I agree that the original press release flubbed the explanation. Here's how I think they should have presented it instead:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33971377#33977940

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#724

Post by insane_dreamer »

belltaco wrote: post #687
988747 wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention the money they would save on electricity bills.

The electricity bill is like $2000. It'd waste more money for a manager to think about how to replace equipment, at California pay rates. This whole thread is making me lose faith in HN.

Actually 83 KwH costs only about $20 in CA (avg $0.25 / KwH and probably LRL pays even less.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#725

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

markasoftware wrote: post #625
opportune wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agree. We should be dumping as much as we can in getting fusion up and running ASAP. It could be a silver bullet to stop climate change alone, and by driving energy costs lower, enable huge innovations in AI/automation and increasing material wealth. $1T to move fusion forward just 5 years from eg 2040 to 2035 could alone have a huge ROI in terms of climate mitigation and decarbonization

Will not be a silver bullet, electricity production contributes less than half of global CO2 emissions. Still need other solutions for transport, industrial processes, agriculture, etc. Further, it's possible that fusion plants might be prohibitively expensive to build and maintain, even if their fuel is cheap.

People should understand that it is all an energy problem, regardless of how that energy is currently delivered. Transportation can be (and, of course, is being electrified), most industrial processes and agriculture currently use fossil fuels as inputs because its the cheapest source of input.

For example, nitrogen fixation for fertilizer currently uses natural gas almost entirely for the source of hydrogen. Vastly cheaper energy means it would make much more sense to switch this to electricity, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2021.5808....

But I agree with your sentiment, there are a lot of engineering details to consider before one can shout "free energy".

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#727

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrr2 »

azinman2 wrote: post #204
hackernewds wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funding does seem miniscule given we spend 100x more on funding military excursions in the name of energy security

Is the bottleneck for fusion money though?

I think a major bottleneck for fusion research from the lay public (including myself) is lack of interest.

Fission reactors work really well and have been around for 50+ years. If we are going to go nuclear instead of renewable, we need to address the elephant in the room.

The elephant in the room is: why not just fission?

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#728

Post by pontifier »

dsign wrote: post #608

HN people has three orders of magnitude more technical background and education than politicians, yet when it's about fusion, fision, renewables and climate warming, we only manage to output a miserable 0.01 % consensus and the rest dissipates in waste argument. It comes to reason, the politicians are going to produce only 0.00001% of consensus. Conclusion: things are looking rather bad. We are not going to achieve C…

It doesn't matter if people agree, it only matters if it works or not.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#729

Post by itishappy »

civilized wrote: post #345
Robotbeat wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they’ve been able to do it multiple times, which is better than the zero or one times before.

Curious where you found this? I skimmed the press release for a minute and didn't immediately see discussion of the repeatability.

This was the second time. The energy out/in ratio was higher this time, hence the claim of better scaling.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#730

Post by [deleted] »

bmmayer1 wrote: post #103
jkelleyrtp wrote: post #33

> LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE) Yesterday, everyone was complaining about the 2.2:2.0 ratio, but now we're working with 3.15:2.05. With modern lasers, that'd be a total Q of 0.375 assuming 100% ef…

This is a stupid question but I don't know anything about fusion: How is it possible for X energy to create X+Y energy in output? Doesn't that violate some fundamental law of physics?

[deleted]
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